ah of course - that'd be an optimistion thing to reduce the load on the DB... makes perfect sense now.
Just my 2 cents, perhaps rather than omitting the reply altogether (with no reason why), the webpage fetcher could inject something like content suppressed due to User Settings | text/header depth values
That would at least tell the user that the message was intentionally not displayed and a hint on where the setting is - and avoid them thinking they've stumbled onto some weird bug or something...
of course the admins might disagree with me.
Cheers